Diglossia, or the use of two forms of a language in a single speech community, is widespread. Differences between the nonstandard form, used for everyday conversations, and the standard form, used for formal occasions and writing, often extend to phonology as well as grammar and vocabulary. Most preschoolers from diglossic families are routinely exposed to the colloquial nonstandard form during conversations at home because the social setting determines the form their parents use. If early spellings are speech based, exposure to nonstandard phonology should influence the kinds of errors diglossic children make. We investigated this prediction in Rumi Malay that, unlike English, has unambiguous phonology–orthography mappings. For Study 1, two spelling tests (51 words, 26 nonwords) were dictated with standard Malay pronunciation. For words, but not nonwords, the diglossic Singaporean children (N = 52, mean age = 6.5 years) made vowel errors that are consistent with the nonstandard Malay pronunciation they use at home. Study 2 confirmed that these errors are rare for equally proficient Malay spellers from Indonesia who speak standard Malay at home. These results are interpreted as strong evidence for the view that beginners' spellings are based on phonological redintegration of their own speech-based representations.

The objectives of this study are (a) to determine if native speakers of Canadian French at different English proficiencies can use primary stress for recognizing English words and (b) to specify how the second language (L2) learners' (surface-level) knowledge of L2 stress placement influences their use of primary stress in L2 word recognition. Two experiments were conducted: a cross-modal word-identification task investigating (a) and a vocabulary production task investigating (b). The results show that several L2 learners can use primary stress for recognizing English words, but only the L2 learners with targetlike knowledge of stress placement can do so. The results also indicate that knowing where primary stress falls in English words is not sufficient for L2 learners to be able to use stress for L2 lexical access. This suggests that the problem that L2 word stress poses for many native speakers of (Canadian) French is at the level of lexical processing.

Language samples elicited through a picture description task were recorded from 38 adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome (WS) and one control group matched on age, and another matched on age, IQ, and vocabulary knowledge. The samples were coded for use of various types of inferences, dramatic devices, and verbal fillers; acoustic analyses of prosodic features were carried out, and an independent group of judges provided global ratings of the overall expressiveness of the language. In addition, a standardized measure of social adaptive functioning was administered to the parents of the participants with WS. The findings revealed distinctive developmental trends in the use of expressive content and prosodic patterns by adolescents and adults with WS that were not evident among the controls. Ratings of expressiveness by naive judges of the speech samples produced by the participants with WS were related to parent evaluations of adaptive social communication skills; however, the verbal productions of this group were not judged to be significantly more expressive than those of controls.

This study explores factors influencing the degree to which language minority (LM) children from Spanish-dominant homes understand how connectives, such as in contrast and because, signal relationships between text propositions. Standardized tasks of vocabulary, listening comprehension, word reading, and a researcher-designed text cohesion task were administered to 90 fourth-grade LM students. Understanding of connectives was influenced by vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension. The degree of challenge that specific connectives posed to LM students was predicted by the difficulty that connectives presented as vocabulary items and also by the type of semantic relationship between clauses they signaled. The findings point to factors that may present sources of difficulty underlying reading comprehension, in particular the critical role of oral language competencies.

Five experiments examined whether overt repetition (i.e., saying a word aloud) during exposure is critical to the expressive learning of new words. When participants did not engage in overt repetition during exposure, they nevertheless exhibited clear expressive learning, both with and without an accompanying semantics, indicating that overt repetition is not critical to expressive word learning. In addition, learning without overt repetition did not differ from learning with overt repetition, suggesting that overt repetition confers no benefit for learning in this situation. These results are discussed in relation to previous studies, and it is suggested that benefits of repetition may accrue primarily in second language rather than in first language word learning.

Two experiments examined whether text composition engages verbal, visual, and spatial working memory to different degrees. In Experiment 1, undergraduate students composed by longhand a persuasive text while performing a verbal, visual, or spatial concurrent task that was presented visually. In Experiment 2, participants performed a verbal or spatial concurrent task that was aurally presented. Writing performance was not disrupted differentially across the three tasks. Performance on all concurrent tasks showed fewer correct responses and longer RTs relative to single-task, baseline data. However, the demands on visual working memory were as high as those on verbal working memory, whereas demands on spatial working memory were minimal. The findings help to delineate the roles of the verbal, visual, and spatial working memory in written composition.

This study reports on a comparison of the use and knowledge of tense-marking morphemes in English by first language (L1), second language (L2), and specific language impairment (SLI) children. The objective of our research was to ascertain whether the L2 children's tense acquisition patterns were similar or dissimilar to those of the L1 and SLI groups, and whether they would fit an (extended) optional infinitive profile, or an L2-based profile, for example, the missing surface inflection hypothesis. Results showed that the L2 children had a unique profile compared with their monolingual peers, which was better characterized by the missing surface inflection hypothesis. At the same time, results reinforce the assumption underlying the (extended) optional infinitive profile that internal constraints on the acquisition of tense could be a component of L1 development, with and without SLI.